UK to Firewall Inhabitants. Continet to Be Isolated

We may joke about the “Great Firewall of China”, but by the end of 2007 content blocking will be a fact of Internet life in the UK. In June, Vernon Coaker, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Department told Parliament, “I have recently set the UK Internet industry a target to ensure that by the end of 2007 all Internet service providers offering broadband Internet connectivity to the UK public prevent their customers from accesssing those Web sites.” By “those”, he means Web sites carrying pornographic images of children.

How on earth are they going to do this? BT’s current practices provide one model,

Since 2004, BT’s retail service is filtered by its Cleanfeed system, which last February the company reported was blocking about 35,000 attempts to access child pornography sites per day. The list of sites to block comes from the Internet Watch Foundation, and is compiled from reports submitted by the public.

But wait, how about a public Internet content regulator?

[IWF] was set up in 1996 as a way for the industry to regulate itself; the meeting where it was proposed came after threats of external regulation. If all ISPs are required to implement content blocking, and all content blocking is based on the IWF’s list, the IWF will have considerable power to decide what content should be blocked. So far, the IWF has done a respectable job of sticking to clearly illegal pornography involving children. But its ten years have been marked by occasional suggestions that it should broaden its remit to include hate speech and even copyright infringement. Proposals are circulating now that the organisation should become an independent regulator rather than an industry-owned self-regulator.